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MilitajyOrder 

of thqoyal jy 
[etfion of the 
(Jnited ftates 
(ommandeiyof 
the^tate of 
Minnesota jt 



Abraham Lincoln 



AN ADDRESS 



Delivered Before the Military Order 



OF THE 



Bopaf £e<$ion of t$i QXnitti §fake 

Commandery of Minnesota 



At St. Paul, Minnesota, 
February 12th, 1900. 



BY 

Hiram F. Stevens 



•5*3S 



n 

7 Ap'06 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 



It is fitting that, in the state which was the first to estab- 
lish this holiday, in the capital city where the name of the 
first volunteer in the great army of freedom was placed 
upon the roll, in the presence of the last survivor of the 
war governors* by whose loyal aid and energy that army 
was recruited and maintained, who was the first to tender 
troops in defense of the Union, and who, crowned with 
years and with honors, still goes in and out among us, his 
eye not dim nor his natural force abated, the Minnesota 
Commandery of the Loyal Legion should celebrate the day 
that gave to the republic, to freedom and to the world, 
the priceless life and memory of Abraham Lincoln. 

The traveler across a continental range sees height after 
height rising around him in confusing grandeur, but, as he 
passes on down the foothills, one after another loses its 
contour and is obscured, until finally, when far out upon 
the plain, he turns at twilight for a last look, one peak 
alone stands out above the shadowy range, its summit 
piercing the clouds and radiant in the sunlight which has 
left the rest behind. 

Thus it is in human history. As the years go by, one 
after another of those who have been conspicuous among 
their cotemporaries, passes, not into oblivion, but into the 

*Hon. Alexander Ramsey. 



background of history, while that character is indeed col- 
ossal that towers above the horizon of its age. 

It may well be said that that land is fortunate which in 
each century adds the name of one benefactor to the roll 
of the world's immortals ; a name destined to be renowned, 
not alone in the land that gave it birth, or in a single 
sphere of action, but in all lands beneath the sun, and in 
the universal judgment of mankind. 

Such has been the fortune of America. Near the close 
of the eighteenth century she laid to rest the mighty 
Washington, and now his fame is boundless as the race. 
The nineteenth century has not been less prolific than its 
predecessors in its contribution to the list of distinguished 
men, but, although only a generation has passed away 
since the curtain fell in tragedy upon Lincoln's life, and 
we are yet too near the scenes in which he lived to justly 
estimate its lasting influence, we come, upon this closing 
anniversary of the century, to dedicate his memory to the 
ages, assured that history will yield him primacy among 
the illustrious leaders of his time. 

During this period so much has been written and said 
about his life and character that little remains to be told. 
No tongue or pen can add to the lustre of his fame, but to 
his precepts and example, like those of Washington, so 
abundant in inspiration and guidance, we may well resort 
in all the vicissitudes and in every crisis of our national 
life. 

It was long supposed that Lincoln's ancestry was as in- 
ferior as his birth was humble. Nothing is farther from 
the truth. He was descended, in the sixth degree, from 
Samuel Lincoln, of Norfolk, England, a member of the 
Plymouth colony, among whose descendants were three 
governors, an attorney general, a secretary of state, 
and a justice of the supreme court of the United States. 



3 

All his ancestors, except his father, were per- 
sons of enterprise, ability and prominence; all but 
one of them were pioneers, and all of them 
bore scriptural names. For fifty years before his birth 
they had lived in three different slave states. Thus, he in- 
herited from an ancestry of nearly two hundred years of 
adventure, patriotism and sagacity, combined with deep 
religious sentiment, not only natural ability of a high or- 
der, but those qualities of mind and heart that enabled him 
to appreciate the conflicting interests and prejudices which 
had their respective sources at Jamestown and at Ply- 
mouth Rock, and fitted him better than any other man of 
his time to be the final arbiter of their destiny. His pa- 
rents, it is true, were without education and of limited 
means. Ninety-one years ago to-day, in the rude cabin of 
these lowly Kentucky pioneers, began the life of him 
whose memory we meet to honor. His childhood was one 
of poverty, but it was not the poverty of dependence. His 
youth was one of hardship, but it was the kind of hard- 
ship that disciplines, but does not degrade. The fire of 
ambition burned in his bosom from his earliest years, and 
he made all things-^-books, men and events — wisely sub- 
servient to its ends. If he had little of the training of the 
schools, the world was his university. The books he had 
were the world's masterpieces. He learned the stories of 
the Bible at his mother's knee, and to its lofty precepts he 
resorted to his latest days. He had Shakespeare, Burns, 
Blackstone and Aesop's Fables, and these he studied with 
unceasing zeal. Drinking deep at these exhaustless foun- 
tains of knowledge and inspiration, he did not miss the 
rivulets into which men had drawn out their overflow. 
Having the keys of the treasure-house of literature he 
needed not the small coin of its shops. 

If he lacked in social culture it was superseded by the 
rude amenities of frontier intercourse, which sharpened his 
faculties if they did not refine his manners. Born among 



the "plain people," as he loved to call them, he understood 
their traits and feelings. His sympathies were ever with 
them and his services always at their command, and so, 
as he rose in position and influence, he kept their conn- 
dence and esteem. Accustomed from his childhood to 
self-reliance, he became an unerring judge of character. 
Without ostentatious profession, he was ever reverent of 
sacred things. "Show me," said he, "a church where the 
only requirement is to love God and to love man, and I 
will walk a hundred miles to join it." 

To say that he was raised up to meet a great crisis is to 
state but half the truth. More than all other men com- 
bined he induced and developed to its tragic but beneficent 
end the crisis which had impended since the adoption of 
the constitution. 

He demonstrated the fallacy of secession by declaring 
that if one or more states had the right to secede, the logi- 
cal result was that all but one of the states might join in 
seceding and thus, in effect, expel a sovereign state from 
the Union against its will— a proposition which its rashest 
advocate had never had the temerity to advance. 

During a trip to New Orleans in his early manhood he 
witnessed the brutality of the slave market, and from that 
hour became the inveterate foe of slavery. But such was 
his reverence for the Constitution that never, even in the 
throes of civil war, did he favor its forcible abolition until 
justified as a military necessity. His highest hope was for 
its restriction to the original slave states and to gradual 
extinction there through peaceful measures. 

Loving the Union above all else, he felt, as much as any 
statesman lias ever done, the binding obligation of the 
Constitution. Although slavery was abhorent to every 
fibre of his being, he felt bound to recognize the protec- 



5 

tion which the Constitution afforded, until it became a 
choice between the Union and the Constitution. 

When that moment came, and not till then, was he 
ready to destroy slavery, in spite of the Constitution, 
that the Union, which was the object of the Constitution, 
might survive. With dispassionate but resistless logic he 
pierced the sophistry of a hundred years and sounded the 
knell of its approaching doom. But such was the viru- 
lence of feeling that while he became an object of violent 
hatred to the slave interest, this most puissant of cham- 
pions was scorned and reviled by the abolitionists because, 
in his conservatism, he respected the Constitution. 

After his nomination Wendell Phillips referred to him 
as "this huckster in politics who does not know whether 
he has any opinions." 

Lincoln was indeed a politician of the most pronounced 
type, but he belonged to a class of whom the country to- 
day needs more and not less. There are politicians and — 
politicians. Some are like the mercenary troops in earlier 
days — at the service of the highest bidder. But there is 
a large and honorable class who, actuated by deep-seated 
principles, loyally, fearlessly and proudly follow the flag 
of their faith in victory or defeat, whether assigned to 
duty in the ranks or leading gloriously on the ramparts. 
Of this class the most prominent example of the century 
was Abraham Lincoln. First defeated for the legislature 
of Illinois at the age of twenty-three, he tried again with 
better results and was for eight years a member of that 
body — twice being an unsuccessful candidate for speaker. 
Four years later he was elected to congress. Then he was 
an unsuccessful candidate for the commissionership of 
the general land office. He was twice defeated for the 
United States senate. 

His debate with Douglas proved him to be a consum- 
mate master of his art, as well as one of the keenest 
logicians of his day. The Dred Scott decision, upon 



which the southern democrats based their assumptions, 
and from which they brooked no dissent, had declared 
slavery to be inherently right, under the Constitution, and 
therefore entitled to protection in all the territories and 
the states to be formed out of them. Douglas had already 
pronounced in favor of "popular sovereignty," or the 
right of each new state to allow or prohibit slavery. Be- 
tween these two irreconcilable positions Lincoln drove 
Douglas to a choice. If he declared for slavery he would 
lose the senatorial election and alienate the support of the 
northern democracy for the presidency. If he adhered 
to popular sovereignty he was in danger of losing the 
South. Escape was impossible. He chose the latter al- 
ternative, and defeated Lincoln for the senate, but two 
years later the South refused to support him for the presi- 
dency, and put another ticket in the field. The party 
strength was thus divided, and Lincoln was elected by a 
minority of the popular vote. 

But, with all his adroitness, he was no demagogue. He 
did not hesitate to accept the position of attorney for the 
Illinois Central Railroad Company while he was a candi- 
date for the senate. When addressing an assemblage of 
workingmen he said : 

Labor was prior to capital, but property is the fruit of labor. Lei no 
man, therefore, who is houseless, pull down the house of another, but let him 
labor diligently to build one for himself, thus assuring thai hi* own shall be 
safe from violence when built. 

_ In the administration of his high office he proved 
himself a statesman of the first order. From the day 
when he demonstrated his skill as a diplomat in the re- 
vision of Seward's famous dispatch to our minister at the 
court of St. James, to the last important official act of his 
life, relating to reconstruction, subsequent events have not 
only justified his policies, but have shown that any ma- 
terial variance during the war would have been fraught 
with disaster. & 



As an orator he has contributed to the world's literature 
some of its choicest gems. 

The closing lines of his first inaugural, with which he 
concluded a firm but pathetic protest against secession, 
were as touching as they were prophetic. 

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle field and 
patriot grave to every living hoart and hearthstone all over this broad land 
will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they 
will be, by the better angels of our nature. 

Two years and a half later, standing upon Gettysburg's 
immortal heights, he uttered this classic tribute, which will 
be forever finked to the story of that historic ground : 

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this conti- 
nent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that 
all men aro created equal. Now wo are engaged in a great civil war, testing 
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long 
endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war. We have conic to 
dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here 
gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and 

proper that we should do this. But, in a Larger sense, we cannot dedioate 
we cannot consecrate— we cannot hallow— this ground. The brave men, 

living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor 
jtower to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what, 

we say here, but it can never forget what they did hen-. It, is for as, the 
living, rather to be dedicated here i<> the unfinished work which thoy who 

fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for ns to be 
here dedicated to the great task remaining before ns that from these honored 
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the Last 
lull measure of devotion that we here highly resolve that, these dead shall 
not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of 
freedom, and thai government of the people, by the people, for the people, 
shall not perish from the earth. 

The following, from his second inaugural, was his lasl 
public expression of a general character. Its lofty and 
benignant strain transcends mere human diction and 
breathes the spirit of the sublimest utterances of Holy 
Writ : 

Fondly do we hope, fervently d<> we pray, that this mighty scourge of 
war may pass away. let, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth 
piled up by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil 
shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall he 
repaid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years 



ago, so still it must be said 'The judgments of the Lord are true and 
righteous altogether.' With malice toward none, with charity for all, with 
firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish 
the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall 
have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may 
achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all 
nations. 

Entrusted with supreme command of a military estab- 
lishment, compared with which the armaments of ancient 
and modern times shrink into insignificance, and covering 
a field of operations of vast extent, he proved himself 
master of the situation and was in fact, as well as name, 
the commander in chief. Sagacious in selecting and loyal 
in supporting his great commanders, he made possible the 
illustrious achievements and fadeless renown of Grant and 
Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan and their compa- 
triots, whose place in history is secure. 

And how he loved the common soldiers! No man ever 
wielded such power with such tenderness and magnan- 
imity. The Illinois circuit-rider who dismounted in the 
storm to restore the young birds to the nest from which 
they had been blown, became the soft-hearted president 
who went from cot to cot through the hospitals, and who 
subverted military discipline by the frequency of his re- 
prieves. The records of the executive departments teem 
with his correspondence in behalf of the condemned and 
with messages of sympathy to the bereaved. The funeral 
literature of all time contains no tribute more tender and 
expressive than this which he sent to an afflicted mother 
just after his second election: 

Dear Madam : I have been shown, in the files of the war department, a 
statement of the adjutant general of Massachusetts, that you are the mother 
of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak 
and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you 
from a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the 
consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to 
save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your 
bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, 
and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice 
upon the altar of freedom. 



The quaint and humorous drollery which characterized 
him throughout life, and which, at the outset of his na- 
lional career, often provoked the sarcasm of offended dig- 
nity, was but the alloy that strengthened his fine nature 
for the discharge of duties and responsibilities else too 
heavy to be borne ; and, though his humor sometimes bor- 
dered on coarseness or indelicacy, this was but the dross 
in a character whose substance was otherwise of purest 
gold. 

While traitors were secretly plotting or openly attempt- 
ing the destruction of the Union, while the shafts of cal- 
umny from foes and carping criticism from those who 
should have been friends, were falling thick around him, 
— under the weight of burdens and vexations seemingly 
too grievous to be borne, he cherished no malice in his 
heart, his lips gave utterance to no abuse. Believing in 
the justice of God, and basing his conduct upon principles 
that antedated the decalogue and will survive the wreck 
of human laws and constitutions, he wrought in faith and 
patience to the end, and so he came to be the incarnation 
of the regenerated brain, heart and conscience of the na- 
tion. 

And yet you shall search the pages of history in vain for 
a parallel to the national career of seven swift, eventful 
years which transformed the unknown Illinois politician 
into the foremost figure of his century. If we would 
learn the secr< I of thai sex ial alchemy by which the son of 
the Kentucky pioneer, reared in the narrow circle of fron- 
tier privation, became the ruler whose sagacious leader- 
ship in the crisis of the republic withstood the criticism 
of statesmen and savants, and won the lasting homage of 
mankind, may we not find its solution in that immortal 
tice of his, which was expressed in every acl of thai 
' arnest, patient, i agacious life : 

;, . ,.,,<• faith that r\;-): t main might, and In that faith let us, to 
do our duty ;ih wo underi tand It. 



10 

The century opened with peans of acclaim to Napoleon^ 
"the man of destiny," beneath whose tread the continent 
of Europe quaked for twenty years. The century is 
drawing to its close, and, in the sculptured pomp of his 
stately tomb upon the Seine, beneath the purple dome of 
the Hotel des Invalides, amid the marble emblems of his 
victories and surrounded by his battle flags, the great em- 
peror sleeps in the icy calm of death. The empire which 
he founded has vanished like the figment of a dream. But 
the republic of Washington and Lincoln endures. The 
bond of union,though strained by civil war, was yet strong 
enough to withstand the test, and from ocean to ocean, 
and from lake to gulf, the arms that once were raised to 
strike are now outstretched to shield. The race whose 
triumphant and civilizing march has known no halt from 
Plymouth Rock to the Philippines, as in the past, so in the 
present, and in all the days to come, true to the precepts 
of the founders and saviors of the republic, and within the 
limits of its Constitution, will accept the duties and re- 
sponsibilities imposed by Providence, and without fear or 
faltering, move on to the fulfillment of its high and con- 
tinuing destiny. 

He who seeks the embodiment of the genius of the 
Union finds it in the apotheosis of the Great Emancipator. 
There, under the arching skies, he stands, erect, serene, re- 
splendent ; beneath his feet the broken shackles of a race 
redeemed ; upon his brow the diadem of liberty with law, 
while around and behind him rise up, as an eternal guard 
of honor, the great army of the republic. 

In the belief that from the martyr's bier, as from the 
battlefield of right, it is but one step to paradise, may we 
not, on days like this, draw back the veil that separates 
from our mortal gaze the phantom squadrons as they pass 
again in grand review before their "martvr president" — 



11 



"In solid platoons of steel, 

Under heaven's triumphal arch, 

The long lines break and wheel, 

And the order is 'Forward, March ! 

The colors ripple o'erhead, 

The drums roll up to the sky, 

And with martial time and tread 
The regiments all pass by— 

The ranks of the faithful dead 
Meeting their president's eye. 

March on, your last, brave mile ! 

Salute him, star and lace ! 
Form 'round him, rank and file, 

And look on the kind, rough face ! 

But the quaint and homely smile 

Has a glory and a grace 
It had never known erstwhile, 

Never in time or space. 

Close 'round him, hearts of pride ! 
Press near him, side by side ! 

For he stands there not alone ; 
For the holy right ye died, 
And Christ, the crucified, 

Waits to welcome his own." 



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